Featured in

How I Get Things Done At Virtually Does It (part I of the Behind The Scenes series)

I’ve written on the blog before about working on your business as well as in it, how important this is, but how it can often get pushed down the list as other work for our clients takes over.

Whenever I came to time to work on my business, things always felt far less organised than the way I managed my client work, and I didn’t feel that I was using that time as productively as I could be. Do you ever feel overwhelmed by everything that you want to do for your own business? Yep, me too and I don’t know a business owner that doesn’t at some time or another. Ideas are noted down here and there, you’ve got drafts of copy, newsletters and blog posts in various forms, and even the odd email to yourself when you’ve had a flash of inspiration! How will you ever get all this together in one place and take action to develop your business?

It doesn’t have to be this way. Meet Asana.

Asana is a project management platform, designed primarily for team collaboration on shared projects, allowing communication with other team members without the use email, and giving everyone involved on that project an overview of tasks, actions, and milestones. However, it is perfectly suited to working on projects solo, and the functionality is suited to one person, or many.

I became familiar with Asana last year when a client and I tested it out to see if it suited a couple of big projects they had on the go at the time. It wasn’t quite what they had in mind, but I really enjoyed using it and saw how it could work brilliantly for keeping track of what goes on at Virtually Does It.

So how do I use it?

It’s become known as Virtually Does It’s Business Hub. It contains everything that goes on in my own business, here’s a snapshot….

Editorial calendar for blog posts

Newsletter themes

An overview of processes, for example, when a new client joins

Ideas for development

Projects that I am working on at the moment, tasks and actions

Website updates/amendments

Here’s an example of how it worked for me….

I was working on my ‘Business Boosters’ (now known as Systems Made Simple) in the second half of last year and used Asana to keep track of what needed to be done from start to finish. I was able to break the project down into the main parts, content, design, how they would work in practice, and then into the individual Boosters too if there were any specific actions for that.

In each sub-project I made notes and kept reminders, tasks and actions, linking to any documents stored in Dropbox so if I needed to review the copy for example, or design options from my graphic designer, it was all easily accessible within the platform. I received daily emails if there was something I needed to do or check on, helping to keep me on track.

I can honestly say that it helped no end with keeping everything in one place that I was working on, and Business Boosters were launched seamlessly earlier this year!

The best bits

It didn’t feel like I was having to work at being organised! I’m pretty organised anyway as you might expect, but Asana made it feel really easy. Although there are templates to help you set up projects, these are easily customisable so you can suit it to what you’re doing.

The projects can be ‘copied’ so you don’t need to start from scratch each time. So, say you do monthly webinars for example, each month you’ll need to do the same tasks and actions in order to get ready to host the webinar, you can copy the project and just update content to what you’re currently doing.

You can archive all your past projects, but they are still available as a reference guide, so if you want to know who you used for graphic design, or how you did a particular newsletter, you can refer back to the project and the information is there. No more searching your emails!

If you want to make things happen in your own business, this is the way to do it!

If you’d like to know more on how Asana may work for you, take a look at their website, or feel free to email me or leave a comment below and I’ll happily share more about how I use it for my business.

Praise for Virtually Does It

I’m working in a different way, reaching more people, and earning more, which in turn is great for me and my family. There are a number of things that I’ve done to get to this point, but the most significant factor that has enabled me to do this was the decision to work with you. Thank you!!!